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      Georgia to Put School Shooting Suspect’s Parent on Trial, Testing a Novel Tactic

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      After four people were killed at Apalachee High School, prosecutors charged a student and his father, who officials say had given the boy the gun as a gift.In a landmark criminal case in Michigan earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents convicted in connection with killings carried out by their child in a mass shooting.Now, in the first mass school shooting in the United States since those convictions, Georgia officials appear poised to try the same tactic. On Thursday, prosecutors filed charges, including two counts of second-degree murder, against the father of the suspected gunman, saying he had provided a gun to his son “with knowledge that he was a threat to himself and others.”Such charges were all but unheard of before the Michigan case, and the Georgia prosecution will test the emerging push to hold parents responsible for mass shootings by young people.The bigger test may be whether the prospect of criminal prosecution spurs parents to do more to seek help for troubled children and to keep them away from guns in a country awash in firearms.Proponents of such prosecutions have said that charging parents can help prevent young people from carrying out such shootings. But critics say it’s a misguided effort that scapegoats parents while lawmakers fail to act to reduce gun violence. And its effectiveness as a deterrent may be limited by the deep dysfunction already at play in the families of some of the young people implicated in mass shootings.The prosecution of the Crumbleys, after their 15-year-old son killed four people in 2021 at a high school outside Detroit, was seen as a long shot. But in separate trials, the Crumbleys were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Walz’s Pennsylvania Campaign Swing Underscores Challenges in the Battleground

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      Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Thursday capped two days of crisscrossing Pennsylvania, talking up Vice President Kamala Harris’s experience, taking shots at former President Donald J. Trump and making his now familiar pleas to voters that they fight for freedom with optimism.“Look, it would be easier if we didn’t have to do this. It would be easier if these guys wouldn’t undermine our system, if they wouldn’t lie about elections, if they wouldn’t put women’s health at risk. But they are, so it’s a privilege for us to do the fight,” he said in Erie, Pa., where he stumped from a stage at the edge of Presque Isle Bay before hundreds of cheering supporters waving “Coach” and “Kamala” signs.The appearance was one of several events that Mr. Walz used to blitz the local media airwaves and fire up Democratic volunteers with the Midwestern dad charm that his party is banking on to help draw white working-class voters. Mr. Walz, and his daughter, Hope, hit several cities in counties that went for Mr. Trump in 2016 — stung by fading American manufacturing and a difficult economy.The shooting this week at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., added urgency to his message at the Erie rally and at local Democratic offices, where he stressed it was in voters’ power to elect leaders willing to pass gun-safety laws, tackle climate change and ensure freedom in health decisions.“I say it as a gun owner; I say it as a veteran; I say it as a hunter: none of the things we’re proposing infringes on your Second Amendment right. But what does infringe upon this is our children going to school and being killed,” he said at a Harris-Walz field office in Erie. “It is unacceptable, and it doesn’t have to be this way. So we end that with our votes. We end it with a vision of a better America.”Onstage later, he recalled sitting with the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut when he was still a member of Congress and a cardholder of the National Rifle Association. “I think about it — today, my son, this week, started his senior year of high school,” Mr. Walz said. “And it’s bittersweet for me because those killed at Sandy Hook would have been entering their senior year, too.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Thomas Crooks, Donald Trump, and the Banality of Gun Violence

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      Eleven of the last 12 American presidents have endured an assassination attempt or a plot against their lives. The same is true for 20 of the country’s 45.Most of the recent plots have been foiled early, making the indelible image of Donald Trump fist-pumping in Pennsylvania seem like an atavistic monument or an ominous portent, or perhaps both. In the bedtime-story version of our national mythology, the country left behind the violence and disorder of the 1960s decades ago, for what turned out to be a wobbly but enduring peaceful equilibrium, one whose veneer began to crack only recently, with violent rhetoric rekindling over the last decade especially prominently on the right. But as David Dayen noted in The American Prospect the day after the shooting, in the 1970s Gerald Ford was shot at, and in the 1980s Ronald Reagan was actually shot; in both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies, shots were fired at the White House.Not all of these attempts were serious, but if amateur marksmanship and a chance gust of wind are what spared Donald Trump’s life last Saturday, similar vicissitudes might have ended Ford’s or Reagan’s, as well, in which case we would all be telling very different stories about the last 50 years of American history. And though we may describe the stochastic terror of the last decade in terms of ugly bumper stickers and reckless speeches, there has been real violence, not just incitement. Gabrielle Giffords was in fact shot, and almost killed; Steve Scalise, too.“America is staring into the abyss,” The Financial Times declared in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, but often we see chaos around the corner as a way of telling ourselves it hasn’t already arrived. “No political party, movement, ideology or manner of thinking has had an absolute monopoly on this violence, and it really hasn’t mattered whether the surrounding political atmosphere was aggressive or docile,” Dayen wrote. “In our messy reality, political violence exists as a background hum.” Already, it seems, the assassination attempt has faded from the news, having hardly made a mark on the shape of the presidential race or, beyond a few ear bandages worn in showy solidarity, on the Republican National Convention which almost immediately followed.It’s not even clear whether it is right to call last weekend’s shooting an act of political violence. The attempted assassination produced only a brief flare of partisan meaning, though the motive was never clear. The gunman was a registered Republican and recognizably a conservative to classmates but not, it seems, an especially active or outraged political actor, and had not left much of a memorable ideological impression on those who knew him. He apparently donated $15 to a progressive organization in 2021, and as OSINT sleuths and self-deputized detectives argued about it over the weekend, it was striking to think how much meaning seemed to hang on a donation the size of a trip to Starbucks. When no obvious partisan explanation was immediately found, we simply moved on.Perhaps a motive will become clearer in the days ahead. But for now, there is not much more to go on, and it seems likeliest that the would-be assassin remains a kind of cipher. Like the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock before him, Thomas Crooks briefly tore a rupture in the fabric of American reality only to fill the space with a kind of silence, a mute biography and an unstated philosophy — a peculiarly American kind of terrorism in which the act of violence does not call attention to a cause greater than the shooter or generate a politically strategic backlash. Instead, it briefly elevates the profile of the man with the gun.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Upholds Law Prohibiting Domestic Abusers From Owning Guns

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      The justices rejected a Second Amendment challenge to a federal law that makes it a crime for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders to possess a gun.The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the government may disarm a Texas man subject to a domestic violence order, limiting the sweep of its earlier blockbuster decision that vastly expanded gun rights.That decision, issued in 2022, struck down a New York law that put strict limits on carrying guns outside the home. It also established a new legal standard for assessing laws limiting the possession of firearms, one whose reliance on historical practices has sown confusion as courts have struggled to apply it, with some judges sweeping aside gun control laws that have been on the books for decades.The new case, United States v. Rahimi, explored the scope of that new test. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, the author of the majority opinion in the 2022 decision, dissented.Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that Second Amendment rights had limits.“When a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may — consistent with the Second Amendment — be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect,” he wrote. “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms.”The case started in 2019 when Zackey Rahimi, a drug dealer in Texas, assaulted his girlfriend and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone, leading her to obtain a restraining order. The order suspended Mr. Rahimi’s handgun license and prohibited him from possessing firearms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      It’s Unanimous: In the Senate, Neither Party Consents to the Other’s Ideas

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      Democrats sought to quickly reinstate a ban on gun bump stocks after a Supreme Court ruling. It was the latest Senate floor fight to end in a predictable stalemate.In the Senate, the term “U.C.” stands for “unanimous consent” — usually verbal shorthand for an agreement by all senators to quickly take up and pass a bill. But with the November elections just months away, it might as well stand for: “You see? Our political opponents are dead wrong on this issue.”With the focus of the political universe turning to the upcoming fight for control of Congress and the White House, lawmakers are spending most of their time not on real legislative work but in trying to corner their rivals on hot-button issues.On the Senate floor in recent days, those efforts have often taken the form of unanimous consent requests that are designed to fail, thus spotlighting one party or another’s refusal to agree to a policy proposal.Such procedural skirmishes provide a shortcut to Senate showdowns on wedge issues or subjects on which one party believes it has the upper hand. That was the case on Tuesday, when Democrats attempted to quickly bring up and pass a bill that would outlaw gun bump stocks after the Supreme Court last week struck down a ban on the devices.Like similar recent maneuvers, Democrats knew the U.C. attempt would fail because of a Republican objection, but they tried anyway in a bid to give themselves a talking point against the G.O.P.“What today’s bill does is return things to the status quo set by Donald Trump, saying bump stocks are dangerous and should be prohibited,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on Tuesday. “Senate Republicans by and large supported Donald Trump’s ban on bump stocks back then, so they should support this bill today.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hallie Biden Is a Key Witness in Hunter Biden Gun Trial

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      Hallie Biden, Mr. Biden’s ex-girlfriend and the widow of his brother, Beau, described his self-destructive behavior around the time he applied for a gun in 2018.Hallie Biden, a former girlfriend of Hunter Biden and widow of his brother, Beau, took the stand on Thursday, telling jurors that she saw him buy, stash and smoke vast amounts of crack cocaine in the fall of 2018 when he claimed to be drug-free on a firearms application.Ms. Biden — speaking in nervous, clipped bursts as she faced Mr. Biden across the fourth-floor courtroom — admitted that he had introduced her to crack in the summer of 2018. She said she was ashamed and embarrassed by their behavior when the two briefly lived together in a rented house in Annapolis, Md., a time when both were in shock over Beau Biden’s death.“It was a terrible experience that I went through,” she said.Ms. Biden is, by far, the most important witness for the prosecution, offering the most detailed, and intimate, portrait of Mr. Biden’s reckless and self-destructive behavior at the time.Mr. Biden, she said, bought multiple rocks of crack in Washington, where he kept an apartment — some the size of “Ping-Pong balls, or bigger maybe” — and stored them in his “backpack or car.”Ms. Biden said she discovered the gun at the center of the case when she was rifling through Mr. Biden’s vehicle the morning after he showed up at her house. It was part of a “pattern” of erratic behavior, she added, saying he would be unreachable for weeks at a time and she or her children would scrounge through his car for drugs or alcohol to help him “start anew and deal with stuff” when he reappeared exhausted at her home.When she searched the car on Oct. 23, she described noticing “a dusting of powder” that she assumed to be “remnants of crack cocaine” before finding the gun in a case with a broken lock. Flustered, she said she improvised a way to dispose of it at a grocery store nearby.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows

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      Last Thursday, Sonia Sotomayor helped protect the country from Donald Trump, and she did it in an unexpected way — by defending the National Rifle Association.Let me explain.Attempts to target the free speech of political opponents are often the first sign of a decline into authoritarianism. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1860, after an angry mob shut down an abolitionist event in Boston, “No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech.”“Liberty,” he went on, “is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”That’s exactly right, and that’s why Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A. against a hostile attack from a Democratic official in New York has ramifications well beyond New York politics and well beyond the battle over gun rights. By upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A., the Supreme Court reinforced the constitutional wall of protection against vengeful government leaders, including Trump.Here’s what happened. In 2017, Maria Vullo, who was then the superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, began investigating the N.R.A. Carry Guard insurance program. As the court’s opinion explains, Carry Guard was an insurance affinity program in which the N.R.A. offered insurance that “covered personal-injury and criminal-defense costs related to licensed firearm use” and even “insured New York residents for intentional, reckless and criminally negligent acts with a firearm that injured or killed another person.”Under the affinity program, the N.R.A. would offer the insurance as a member benefit and various insurance companies, including Chubb Limited and Lloyd’s of London, would underwrite the insurance and the N.R.A. would take a cut of the premium payments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Accepting N.R.A. Endorsement, Trump Pledges to Be Gun Owners’ Ardent Ally

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      Former President Donald J. Trump, accepting the endorsement of the National Rifle Association on Saturday, cast himself as a powerful ally for gun owners and gun businesses, contending that under President Biden the right to bear arms was “under siege.”“If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns,” Mr. Trump said in Dallas, where he headlined the N.R.A.’s annual meeting.Mr. Trump addressed the group as he is on trial in Manhattan on criminal charges that he falsified business records related to a hush-money payment to a porn star. Onstage in Dallas, he contended that he knew “better than anybody” what it was like to have rights taken away.“In my second term, we will roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment,” he said to loud applause.The annual gun rights gathering appeared far more muted than the last time Mr. Trump attended it, in 2022, in Houston, just days after the mass shooting of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Greg Abbott, the state’s governor, and John Cornyn, its senior senator, did not attend that year’s convention, citing other commitments. Several marquee musical performers pulled their participation out of respect, they said, for the victims and their families.The N.R.A., the nation’s most prominent gun rights group and once a potent political force, has found itself in a hobbled state. In recent years, it has shed members and been besieged by setbacks, defections and internal strife. In February, a Manhattan jury ruled that its leaders had engaged in a yearslong pattern of financial misconduct and corruption.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More